Speakers promote morals

By Emily Entress

This weekend, top academics and experts in the field of social investing and ethical business practices gathered at Santa Clara. The group aimed to share ideas and formally initiate a conversation about the benefits of business with a socially responsible mind-set. The conference, "The Value of Values," was held in Lucas Hall on campus last Friday and Saturday, May 14 and 15.

The conference was hopefully the first step in initiating an annual collaboration of top academics in the field of socially responsible investing, increasing the discussion surrounding the importance of social awareness for businesses. "This is one of the strongest groups of academics to discuss this topic, ever, especially in the financial world," remarked Lloyd Kurtz, the Conference Chair and the Lead Portfolio Manager of Socially Responsible Investing at Nelson Capital, one of the event sponsors.

Some of the speakers included corporate social responsibility experts Brad Barber of UC Davis, and Kellie McElhaney of UC Berkeley. Many Santa Clara professors also spoke, including finance department chair Professor Sanjiv Das, Associate Finance Professor George Chacko, and Finance Professors Meir Statman and Hersh Shefrin.

SCIFIRM was co-founded by Sharath Sury, Dean's Executive Professor in Finance in the business school, and based around research done by leading professors in the field of behavioral finance, including Statman and Sheflin.

"The work that Meir Statman and Hersh Sheflin have done here at Santa Clara is really critical because they challenged modern financial theorists," Kurtz stated. "They said, your (financial behavior) theory is probably a good one, but we're really interested in the fact that people don't follow it. And so they've studied why it is that people don't do what, in theory, is economically optimal. In fact, their theory predicts social investment."

The goal of SCIFIRM is to extend the reach of the material beyond academics and theorists so that it includes students.

"This is supposed to become a student organization, (along) with the finance association, to get a lot of students involved in helping with research," said Nadine Rasch, a senior Finance student at Santa Clara who has taken classes with Surey, the founder of SCIFIRM. "I'd say a lot of professors here are great with the research part, but they want to get students involved in assisting with the research, so I think that's really good."

The reach of socially responsible investing has broader implications, though, than involving students in the research behind it. The current young adult population is placing more importance on social justice in the working world.

"Millennials, between (the) ages of 8 to 28, want to work for socially responsible companies; they factor it into their job searches," said Kellie McElhaney, a John C. Whitehead Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Corporate Responsibility at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

In her speech, titled "Just Good Business: CSR in Practice," she highlighted the important effects, both in and outside of the business world, of incorporating socially responsible business practices into the framework of companies.

"It isn't just about doing good and doing philanthropic work for charity, it is about making a business successful and weighing the financial aspects of it so that it is sustainable," said Barbara Jones, a reporter for The Economist who attended the event. "If you want to do good in the world you don't want to do it once, you want to create a sustainable model so you can keep doing it, so you have to look at the financial factors."

Hopefully SCIFIRM and this group of elite academics will not only initiate this idea, but carry it forward into the future.

Contact Emily Entress at eentress@scu.edu or (408) 554-4546.